Amara Karan as Gina Miller
(Picture: Mark Senior)I think God came early on to a pretty firm view about me making the switch from journalist to playwright. First, he threw the pandemic at my debut work, Bloody Difficult Women, pushing its run at the Riverside Studios in west London back from last June to this month.
One real-life character portrayed in the show suddenly saw fit to barrage the producers with intimidating legal letters. There was then the mighty storm that almost blew the Riverside into the Thames, just as it was starting previews, and then, of course, came the ongoing horror story in the Ukraine that is keeping us all glued to our television screens, in no mood to head out anywhere.
So, on press night last week, when the Almighty fixed it for there to be a Tube strike, on top of everything else, we were all pretty much punch drunk. I could tell you now about a member of the cast who has just had to be replaced because of Covid, but you get the idea. That the show about Gina Miller’s famous court case against Theresa May’s government over parliamentary sovereignty has somehow managed - in the best traditions of the theatre - just to go on and keep going on has struck me as nothing short of miraculous. I have come to love every member of the cast who each epitomises for me grace under pressure.
To no one’s great surprise, the play has already made some powerful enemies, as well as some great friends. About these and some of the peculiarly polarised reviews, I am sanguine. As I was warned by Lord Pannick, who gamely voiced his own part as Gina Miller’s QC in one scene in the play, anyone who took a view about the court case, would assuredly take a view, too, about the play.
It is, however, an intensely human rather than a political or legal piece that I’ve written, and it’s because of that the only verdict I ever worried about was Gina Miller’s. To put it mildly, she has been an indulgent friend for more than ten years. When I told her not so long ago that I had written a play in which she figures prominently, she was at first shocked, but gradually came round to the idea. If anyone was going to do it, she said, it might as well be someone who knows her and saw at first-hand what she had to go through.
I am a loyal friend, but I’d realised when I started to write the play the choice was between making it either hagiographical or honest. I chose the latter because I understood I had a responsibility to audiences, to everyone involved in the production, and, without sounding unduly pretentious about it, to history.
Some sections of the press were, of course, vile to Gina when she began that case in 2016, and one story in particular – that inquired why she never completed her law degree course – got into territory that I knew would be uniquely painful for her. The reason she never completed the course was that she had been subjected to a savage sexual assault by a group of men at her college. That was why she gave up on her childhood dream of becoming a barrister.
I felt if I ignored the story I would not only be failing to get across the full impact of the media attacks on her, but I would also be ignoring a formative event in her life, which, I believe, made her defiant, just as, in terms of Theresa May, losing her parents in two terrible tragedies in her early life, made her - I felt - close in on herself.
I know I was dabbling my fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls in the play, but, on the red carpet after the first night performance, Gina was, as ever, calm and composed. She talked about the emotional “rollercoaster” the show had put her though – that she had never anticipated it could get into matters that were so personal – but she felt, for all that, it had a message that was valuable about our politics and our country. What I know heartened her were the women - a complete stranger, every one - who came up to her at the theatre to say they had no idea what she had been through and they wanted to express their solidarity.
I have invited Mrs May to see the play too, and I hope she may yet come. Some of her friends have seen it and told me they feel I have been, if also honest about her, also ultimately fair.
Inevitably, some friends in journalism have lately been asking if I’d recommend switching to writing plays and all I can tell them is that if they do, they’re going to have to learn to roll with the punches. It’s a tough old game is theatre - much tougher than journalism - and there’s certainly no money in it, but if you believe you’ve got something to say, you’ve got to keep at it, no matter what, and, in a world going mad, I would say it has, for me, certainly given life meaning.
